LISTEN TO ONE: Maple Leaf Rag
This is the fourth and final album (not counting repackagings) by the Reverend Gary Davis, Harlem street singer and preacher. and mentor to nearly every young guitar player in New York. The first three were released on Bluesville, but Bluesville was no more, shelved along with Prestige's other jazz subsidiaries, New Jazz, Swingville and Moodsville.
There were still some smaller subsidiary labels: Prestige International, Prestige Lively Arts and Prestige Folklore, more in competition with smaller independents like Folkways and Caedmon than with the other jazz independents. I haven't included them in my history/reminiscence of Prestige Records.
But since I have been following Gary Davis on Prestige, I'm including this Folklore release, which is an interesting addition to the Davis catalog, in that it's all instrumental. Davis was one of the great blues guitar stylists as well as one of the great teachers, and here plays some ragtime and some folk styles as well as blues, and also plays banjo and harmonica on this unaccompanied field recording by Sam Charters.
His harmonica (on "Coon Hunt") is reminiscent of Sonny Terry's, on "Fox Chase." He's really adept on banjo, which he plays on "Devil's Dream" and "Please Baby." His finger picking banjo style is reminiscent of nothing so much as his guitar style. And his guitar mastery is sufficient to make one glad that he put out an all-instrumental album. He has tempos from "Slow Drag" to "Fast Fox Trot," and from ragtime ("Maple Leaf Rag") to march ("United States March"), and a tribute to multitasking with "The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (And Playing the Guitar at the Same Time)."
This would be Davis's last recording for Prestige, but he continued performing, and recording, right up to his death in 1972. A performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 brought him to the attention of new audiences, and his last years were some of his most successful ones.
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